The
common origin of superconductivity in iron-based compoundsMaterials Today Share Beyond their superconductivity, iron pnictides (parent compound CaFe2As2) and the iron chalcogenides (parent Fe1+yTe) have important features in common, such as their band structures and magnetic excitations. A team of researchers from the U.S., China and the U.K. have found that even though the nearest neighbor exchange couplings between chalcogenide and pnictide atoms are different, the next nearest neighbor
exchange couplings are similar. This implies that the key magnetic exchange thought to be responsible for high temperature superconductivity may occur here rather than in adjacent atoms as predicted by first principles density functional calculations.More

Africa tweeting for scienceSciDev.Net Share Africa's mobile Internet boom could revolutionize the way scientists, policymakers and the public interact, says Linda Nordling. Most Africans access the
Internet through their mobile phones. The ITU reports that usage of the mobile Internet overtook fixed connections in Africa in the last quarter of 2009. This development will open up new lines of communication between scientists, policymakers and the public.More

Physicists discover new way to visualize warped space and timeEurekAlert Share When black holes slam into each other, the surrounding space and time surge and undulate like a heaving sea during a storm. This warping of space and time is so complicated that physicists haven't been able to understand the details of what goes on — until now. Physicists at Caltech, Cornell University, and the National Institute for Theoretical Physics in South
Africa have developed conceptual tools they've dubbed tendex lines and vortex lines. More

2 dying stars to be reborn as 1ScienceDaily Share White dwarfs are dead stars that pack a sun's-worth of matter into an Earth-sized ball. Astronomers have just discovered an amazing pair of white dwarfs whirling around each other once every 39 minutes. This is the shortest-period pair of white dwarfs now known. Moreover, in a few million years they will collide and merge to create a single star.More

Do plants have magnetic fields?UC Berkeley Share Using some of the most sensitive magnetic detectors available, physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, tried to measure magnetic fields around a titan arum, the world's largest flower. Though the interference from local BART trains and traffic bedeviled the experiment, and their ultimate failure to detect a magnetic field, they did establish that the plant generated no
magnetic field greater than one-millionth the strength of the Earth's magnetic field.More

Quantum interference of large organic moleculesNanowerk News Share A quantum interference experiment on a molecular system of more than 400 atoms has set a new record for the verification of
the quantum properties of nanoparticles. In addition, an important aspect of the famous thought experiment known as "Schroedinger's cat" was probed. The experiment shows that even complex systems, with more than 1,000 internal degrees of freedom, can be prepared in quantum states that are sufficiently well isolated from their environment to avoid decoherence and to show almost perfect coherence. More

Australian photonics center aims at vast improvements in InternetIT Wire Share Australia has officially kicked of a six year $23.8 million research program into photonic chip technology at the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices
for Optical Systems. CUDOS has the potential to revolutionize optical communications. CUDOS is a collaboration between seven Australian universities with photonic research programs.More